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Today Ethiopia is in the midst of another drought, and thousands of peasants are again on the move, trekking across the parched landscape in search of that bag of flour or handful of beans that will keep them going for a few more days or weeks. Ethiopia, which has earned the unhappy honor of being rated the globe's poorest country by the World Bank (average annual per capita income: + $110; infant mortality rate: 16.8%), is on the brink of disaster again. At least 6 million of its 46 million people face starvation, and only a relief effort on the scale of the one launched three years ago will save them. Some of Ethiopia's needs have already been met, but the grain still required could be the difference between hunger and death for millions. As the cry goes out once more for food and money, the sympathetic cannot be faulted for wondering why this is happening all over again. Is the latest famine wholly the result of cruel nature, or are other, man-made forces at work that worsen the catastrophe?
Elsewhere in Africa, conditions are only slightly less precarious. Millions of people up and down the continent face spending Christmas Eve on empty stomachs. Many will surely die unless food shipments arrive early in 1988. The United Nations' World Food Program puts relief requirements for 15 needy countries at 2.7 million metric tons (the 15: Angola, Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Zimbabwe). Only half of this goal has been met so far by donors.
The situation in Ethiopia is not yet as bad as it was two years ago, when hundreds died daily of hunger and disease in mass feeding camps. As of last week there was enough food to last for a month and enough promised in the international aid pipeline to nourish the country through April. While thousands of peasants have been temporarily uprooted from their villages, they have learned the lesson of 1984-85 and have gone in search of food before they are too weak to travel. U.N. officials say that for the moment there are no permanent feeding camps, where more died of rampant infectious disease than of hunger the last time around. Those who gather at Wukro go back to their villages after receiving a month's supply of food, then return in a month or so.
But things could rapidly deteriorate if the available food cannot be distributed quickly enough. "The next few weeks are crucial," said Dr. Goran Hanson, a Swedish Red Cross worker in Addis Ababa. "If food and transport do not arrive in time to keep people in their villages and prevent them from gathering in famine camps, it will simply be disaster. We desperately need food, trucks and planes. We are now short of all three."
The response from the West has again been generous. Last week BBC Correspondent Michael Buerk, whose reporting first alerted the world to the scope of the last famine, led an appeal that raised $650,000 in five days. Weeks before the latest drought attracted publicity, the major private food- aid agencies -- the Red Cross, Oxfam, Caritas, Care and Catholic Relief Services -- were shipping food by sea and air and distributing it to the needy.